America’s Health Care System is Broken: What Went Wrong and How We Can Fix It. Part 4: The Pharmaceutical Industry

As is true for most aspects of the US health care system, we pay much more for medications than do patients in any other country. Not only are new “breakthrough” products expensive, but existing products see price increases that regularly outstrip general inflation, making the pharmaceutical industry very profitable and resulting in many patients skipping or cutting the doses of such critical medicines as insulin. There is little relation between the effectiveness and the price of many medications.